Navigating the personal and the practical in feminist qualitative research with women with experiences of crime and criminal justice

• In Event: Researcher Wellbeing and Emotionally Challenging Research

Abstract

This paper offers, through a reflection-on-experience (Johns, 2021) approach, an exploration of the interrelations, and tensions, between formal ethical procedures, methodological stances and researcher wellbeing. Drawing on first-hand experiences of conducting feminist-grounded qualitative research with women with experiences of crime and criminal justice, the paper gives particular attention to how research methodology has consequences for the lived experience of fieldwork and wellbeing, exemplified through empathy fatigue and grief in the research process. The discussion is situated within a broader critique of contemporary ethical practices and regulations and in particular, how such invisibilise real-life ethical dilemmas and associated consequences on researcher’s wellbeing. The paper is concluded, through the lens of Israel and Gelsthorpe’s (2017) invitation to criminologists to develop our ethical imaginations, a call for more dialogic and collegial forms of ethical practices, that not only tackle ethics in a processual manner, but that pay attention to participants as well as researchers (and inevitably, the interrelationship between the two).

Author

• Linnéa Österman, Gothenburg University